The contagion risk from India’s year-old shadow banking crisis has suddenly turned much graver. What investors don’t know yet is whether the new problem is a $4 billion headache, a $16 billion migraine, or a life-threatening tumor.
On Wednesday evening, the Reserve Bank of India quashed a proposed merger of Indiabulls Housing Finance Ltd., one of the country’s largest real-estate lenders, with Lakshmi Vilas Bank Ltd.
A marriage with a deposit-taking institution would have given much-needed relief to a shadow bank like Indiabulls, which has to support $16 billion in mortgages, advances against property, commercial real estate and other such hard-to-liquidate, long-term